Abstract
The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science is the first historical account of the scientific revolution.1 In this book Burtt placed Newton within a context of culture and religion without devaluing his scientific achievement. But, in a surprising way, the Newtonian world-view is thrown into new light. Burtt claims that the mechanical universe with its Cartesian underpinning, that is, the duality of subject and object, and the mathematization of nature, culminating in “laws of nature,” is just “he objectification of the mood of an age, fitful and temporary”. Furthermore, scientific claims to truth come at the expense of other means of human knowing which we can not afford to lose. Although the book might be read simply as a polemic against logical positivism, which was competing with pragmatism in the U.S. in the 1920s, it should also be considered as a demonstration of a new philosophy of science. In The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science Burtt is saying that science is a culturally conditioned expression of human experience, just one way of knowing among many, and that scientific truth is a changing truth.
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Notes
H. Floris Cohen has given the best account and critique of E.A. Burtt and The Metaphysical Foundations in print today in his The Scientific Revolution, An Historiographical Inquiry,(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Cohen is the first to acknowledge the significance of Burtt’s “radical historical critique,” where others have missed it. Cohen is liberal with his credit to Burtt as “the first to adopt a ‘relative discontinuity’ position” to explain how scientific knowledge is acquired (96, 149) and as “at the head of an array of historians to the Scientific Revolution who, in the sixties, began to look upon this signal event in European intellectual history as having brought, besides impressive gains in our knowledge, some no less consequential losses” (96–97). Although Cohen acknowledges that it is Alexandre Koyré who is at the center of the historiographical “treasure” that the Scientific Revolution has become, he makes it clear that Koyré’s priority in this treasure is a debt he owed to Burtt (101). Most important of all, Cohen did not miss the fact that Burtt’s work has been a powerful influence in “the debate over the rationality of early modern science.” He rightly points out the wide-ranging impact of Burtt’s work on T.S. Kuhn and Frances Yates (111, 179–182) and sums up this way: “Lonely Burtt’s account is still very relevant to the course of present-day discussions of the Scientific Revolution. And what is even more: It is from Burtt’s book that Koyré’s concept of the Scientific Revolution probably found its origin” (89).
Burtt, Two Basic Issues In the Problem of Meaning and Truth in Essays in Honor of John Dewey on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, October 20, 1929, ( New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1929 ), 69.
R.G. Collingwood, Essay on Metaphysics, (Oxford, England: The Clarendon Press, 1940 ).
The term Burtt used here was used both by John Dewey in his Reconstruction in Philosophy and by the Phenomenologists who borrowed it from Francis Bacon.
Metaphysical Foundations,229.
Ibid., 229.
Ibid., 229.
Ibid., 229.
Ibid., 228.
Ibid., 228.
Ibid., 228.
Ibid., 228–229.
Ibid., 227–228.
Metaphysical Foundations,227.
Elaine Daston in Isis,1994.
Burtt’s historical approach earned him the misnomer, Hegelian, but at no time in his long career did Burtt ever believe that there was an Absolute and True Reality or Being qua Being which man could know. His preference for the genetic method led him to a Collingwood brand of historicism and his interest in religion invited the inaccurate conclusion that he was a “true believer.” He was agnostic about the nature and even the existence of the traditional God of Christianity until the last years of his life.
Burtt, The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill,(New York: The Modern Library, 1939), xi–xii.
The Metaphysical Foundations,208.
Quoted from Bertrand Russell, A Free Man’s Worship in Mysticism and Logic (New York, 1918) Metaphysical Foundations,23.
Russell, A Free Man’s Worship in Philosophical Essays, (New York, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1910 ), 61.
Ibid.
John H. Randall, The Making of the Modern Mind, ( Boston, New York, etc.: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1926 ), 637.
John H. Randall, The Making of the Modern Mind,638.
Even further background can be gained on the impact of science during the last of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries in Randall’s Philosophy After Darwin Chapters for The Career of Philosophy Volume III and Other Essays, edited by Beth Singer, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977). See the first three chapters, especially, Chapter 1, The Conflict of the Religious Tradition With Science and page 29 where Randall discusses Bertrand Russell’s A Free Man’s Worship and what Russell’s essay meant to the young radicals around Columbia University in the 1920s.
Bertrand Russell, Two Dogmas of Naturalism,a review of The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science by E.A. Burtt in Dial 79 (September, 1925): 255–258.
Russell, History of Western Philosophy and it Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day,(London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., first published in 1946). New edition (reset), 1961 is cited here, pages 514515.
Ibid., 210.
Ibid., 212.
Ibid., 214.
Ibid., 212.
Ibid., 230.
Ibid., 218. Quoted from Newton’s Principles,II, 314. Burtt’s further notation is: Cf. also Opticks,380.
Quoted from Newton’s Principles,II, 160 in Ibid., 218–219.
Metaphysical Foundations,229.
Ibid., 229.
See James E. Force, Newton’s Sleeping Argument and the Newtonian Synthesis of Science and Religion in Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, A longer View of Newton and Halley. Essays Commemorating the 1985–1986 Return of Comet Halley,edited by Norman J.W. Thrower, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), page 125 and Force, Hume’s Interest in Newton and Science in Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology,edited by James E. Force and Richard H. Poplin, (Dordrecth, Boston and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), 181–206; see especially page 199, footnote 30. Force explains how his interpretation of Newton relies on Burtt. Force has taken Burtt’s reading of Newton and Hume, which involves Burtt’s own undeclared use of Hume’s brand of radical skepticism turned back on Hume to give what Force wants to see as Hume’s reading of Newton. It is Burtt’s reading of Hume and Burtt’s reading of Newton which Force takes as Hume’s critique of Newton.
Force, Newton’s Sleeping Argument and the Newtonian Synthesis of Science and Religion,125.
David Hume, Concerning Natural Religion Part II in The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill,edited and with an Introduction by E.A. Burtt, (New York: Modern Library, Random House, 1939), 699–708 and Part XII, 753–755.
Metaphysical Foundations,300.
H. Floris Cohen, 92.
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Villemaire, D.D. (2002). The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science. In: E.A. Burtt, Historian and Philosopher. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 226. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1331-3_5
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